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Wow. Jim Hugunin joins Microsoft to work on Python for .NET

Via Jon Udell comes *big* news for Python fans.

Jim Hugunin, the creator of Jython, starts work with Microsoft Monday chartered to work towards a production-ready IronPython, and more broadly to improve the state-of-the-art of dynamic languages on the CLR.

Wow.

Dark Matter (Dynamic Languages)

Steve Vinoski has published a useful article on dynamic languages in middleware : Dark Matter Revisited.

My position on this is simple. Anyone coding middlware in a statically compiled language, working in a commercial environment where time is money, has rocks in their head.

XMLOpen 2004, Cambridge, UK, September

I will be giving the closing keynote and also giving a presentation about the joys of XML pipelining at XML Open 2004.

I was in Cambridge a while back at the Optimal XML conference where I did the opening keynote. XML Open 2004 will be more of a challenge as I will need to pull together themes of the conference. Necessarily, it will be a more "on-the-fly" gig but all the more interesting for that.

I'm currently noodling for an over-arching theme. My current favorite is:
a)the relationship between syntactic simplicity and expressive power, and
b)the difference between software as a a hider of complexity and software as expressor of ideas.

There are sessions on Web Services, DSDL, Groovy, Python, Topic Maps, RDF, XPath 2.0 and W3C XML Schema which should provide ample raw material.

Adam Bosworth leaving BEA to join Google

Adam Bosworth is
leaving Bea to join Google.

square roots ahead - the relationships between paper sizes

Markus Kuhn has a fascinating web page about international standard paper sizes and provides the magic numbers you need if your photocopier is ISO challenged. e.g. A3 -> A4 = 71%.

It is also riddled with many "not many people know that" type factoids. Did you know for example, that in Germany many brands of toilet paper are ISO A6 format.

Now *that* is attention to detail.

xerces command line utility

It has taken me an hour to figure this out, so I might save you some time.

If you want to use xerces-j to validate an XML instance against an XSD schema that is specified on the command line (as opposed to using schemaLocation attribute), do this:

java dom.ASBuilder -a foo.xsd -i foo.xml

The FAQ for Using XML Schemas on the apache website says (my italics):

"Each document that uses XML Schema grammars *must* specify the location of the grammars it uses by using an xsi:schemaLocation attribute if they use namespaces, and an xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation attribute otherwise."

This is a tad misleading.